Agent to the stars, including Chris Evans, Sacha Baron Cohen and Billie Piper, Michael Foster prefers to let his clients do the talking. But Foster – co-managing director and majority shareholder of the showbiz and literary agency The Rights House – is rather more vocal about his latest venture, Creative Access.

The registered charity was created by Foster to provide opportunities for paid internships in the creative sector for young people from ethnic minority backgrounds. It aims, over the next three years, to find roles for 750 people across the media, in television, films, publishing, PR and other industries. But it will only be able to do that, insists Foster, with the government's help.

Creative Access has cost £150,000 to date and found roles for about 70 people, bankrolled by Foster and private donations from benefactors such as Richard Desmond, the owner of Channel 5 and the Daily Express and Daily Star. But if Foster's enviable contacts book turned up plenty of willing chief executives to take part in the scheme, his exchanges with various government departments have left him frustrated.

"We have engaged at many levels with the legislature and have great support from both MPs and in the House of Lords, because they see the importance of what we are doing," says Foster. "One would think that the department for business and also the minister who covers both equality and the media, who is now the same person [Maria Miller], would engage with this. But so far, for whatever reason, that hasn't been the case."

Creative Access contributes up to half of the cost of the wages of each internship. Overseen by the recruitment specialists SEO London and New Deal of the Mind, it recruits through student unions, university career services and job centres.

Foster hopes to put right a situation exemplified by the experience of his own company; when The Rights House advertised eight internships, it had 300 people applying, but as far as he could tell not one of them was black or Asian.

"There's a lack of access for black and Asian people into the media," says Foster, who says it is in companies' interest to open up their workforce. The media cannot reflect society, he adds, if society is not reflected in the media. "Economically it makes no sense for business not to reflect society as a whole."

Around 40 companies have so far signed up to take part, including Channel 4, BSkyB, the Big Brother producer Endemol, HarperCollins, Hearst Magazines and Freud Communications, the PR company run by Matthew Freud, who is a Rights House shareholder.

The scheme was officially launched in September, and the first intern it placed was Dominic Grant, who worked on director Matthew Vaughn's movie sequel Kick Ass 2. Vaughn says he recognises that there is "a culture of 'friends and family' in the movie world – I know how important it is to be given a break. Creative Access found us a shortlist of people who all had a passion for film-making, but little or no experience."

"We have gone to all these companies and said 'we can give you a labour force to choose from'," says Foster. "This is not an act of positive discrimination, this is about equalising access."

The BBC is also working with the charity, albeit not creating internships but using Creative Access's database of emerging talent as a resource for potentially hiring people.

The proportion of BBC staff from ethnic minorities has improved since the then director general Greg Dyke famously described it as "hideously white" in 2001. Back then it was 8% of all staff; by March this year it had risen to 12.3%, but only 6.8% of senior managers. At Channel 4, the figure in 2011 was 14%.

But in the creative sector overall, according to a Skillset survey in April last year, just 5% of employees were black, Asian or from other ethnic minority groups.

There are financial challenges ahead. Foster says his brainchild needs £6m of funding over the next three years; it remains to be seen whether the government, in these austere times, will provide the backing he says it requires. Creative Access is also applying for national lottery funding. "It can't be sustained with charitable donations alone," he points out.

Foster's hope is that after the initial three-year period, the greater representation of minority groups will become self-fulfilling, with those who secured jobs helping to bring others into the creative industries. "We cannot survive as a homogeneous business serving a world that is diversifying," he warns in the publicity that accompanies the Creative Access launch. "It is both wrong culturally and harmful economically."

Best known for his showbiz clients such as Evans – with whom he once owned Virgin Radio – Foster now also oversees the prestigious literary agency Peters Fraser & Dunlop, which he bought two years ago.

He avoids the limelight — the last interview he gave was to the Financial Times in 2001. Evans, in his autobiography, describes Foster as a "a very small Jewish man as equally proud of his heritage as he is unfazed by his lack of height".

"This is a social issue and something that as a first-generation Jewish immigrant I clearly recognise," says Foster. "I don't think the colour of your skin should negate your value and worth to society, and be a barrier to engagement."